Designing Foresight | Hinesight....for Foresight

I’m happy to share that my collaboration with [former] design student (and now Dr.) Danilo Zindato exploring the uses of scenarios by futurists and designers is now published. Danila spent a semester with the Houston Foresight program last all as part of her PhD work. She wanted to dig deeper into how futurists use scenarios and compare that with her experience in how designers use them. The piece we worked on for publication in World Future Review took the futurist perspective, as we assumed readers of this journal would be most interested in that. The publication piece at WFR is here; a pre-publication draft is here.

The premise is that foresight and design are growing closer together. The piece opens by providing examples of how that is showing up. It compares process frameworks and then looks more deeply at how designers are using scenarios, to derive implications for futurists. The conclusion notes the each field is feeling pressure to expand their scope and capabilities – foresight to go further downstream and designers to further upstream — and this will lead to more overlap and collaboration between the two in the future.

It is great to have a forum for these kinds of applied, practical pieces. Editors Jim Dator and Aubrey Yee have been repurposing World Future Review to provide a home for these pieces that has been missing in recent years. I strongly encourage fellow practitioners to submit their work here and help to establish and solidify a practitioner home base. — Andy Hines

About Andy Hines

Dr. Andy Hines is Program Coordinator at the University of Houston’s Graduate Program in Foresight, bringing together the experience he earned as an organizational, consulting, and academic futurist. He is also speaking, workshopping, and consulting through his firm Hinesight.

Before that, he was Managing Director of Social Technologies/Innovaro, and served as an Adjunct Professor with the university since 2004. Hines enjoyed earlier careers as a consulting and organizational futurist. He was a partner with Coates & Jarratt, Inc., a think tank and consulting firm that specialized in the study of the future. He was also Futurist & Senior Ideation Leader at Dow Chemical with a mission of using futures tools and knowledge to turn ideas into new business opportunities. Before that, Hines established and ran the Global Trends Program for the Kellogg Company.

Hines is motivated by a professional hunger to make foresight practical and useful, and he believes that foresight can help deliver the insight that is so needed in today’s organizations and the world. His goal, he says, is to infect as many change agents as possible with this message. Thus, he has honed a skill set designed to make foresight more actionable in organizations.

In this pursuit, he has authored five books: Teaching about the Future: The Basics of Foresight Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); ConsumerShift: How Changing Values Are Reshaping the Consumer Landscape (No Limits Publishing, 2011); Thinking About the Future: Guidelines for Strategic Foresight (Social Technologies, 2007); 2025: Science and Technology Reshapes US and Global Society (Oak Hill, 1997); and Managing Your Future as an Association (ASAE, 1994) and has another in the hands of publishers: Teaching about the Future: The Basics of Foresight Education. He has also authored dozens of articles, speeches, and workshops, including the 2003 Emerald Literati Awards’ Outstanding Paper accolade for best article published in Foresight for “An Audit for Organizational Futurists” and the 2008 award for “Scenarios: The State of the Art.” He has appeared on several radio and television programs, PBS Houston, KRIV-26 News, and the CBS “Early Show.” He also co-founded and is former Chair of the Association of Professional Futurists.

About Andy Hines

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